Fish as bioindicators: coal and mercury pollution in Colombia’s ecosystems

Homemade copper-silver plates as an alternative for cleaning mercury-contaminated tailings from artisanal and small-scale gold mining in Colombia

“…Colombia is a country with over 300,000 artisanal miners, most of them informally employed, distributed in 44% of the 1122 municipalities (Serrano, Martínez, & Fonseca, 2015;Veiga & Marshall, 2019). The estimated amount of mercury released to the environment by Colombian artisanal gold miners ranged from 150 to 205 tonnes/a (Cordy et al, 2011;De Paula Gutiérrez & Agudelo, 2020). The large majority of the mercury releases to the environment is with tailings (Veiga, Angeloci, Hitch, & Velasquez-Lopez, 2014).…”

Understanding drivers of mercury in lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush), a top-predator fish in southwest Alaska's parklands

“…Lakes integrate water, energy, nutrients, sediments, and pollutants from their surrounding watersheds and airsheds ( Schindler, 2009 ). Therefore, lake fish often serve as biological indicators of persistent pollutants, like Hg ( Gutiérrez and Agudelo, 2020 ; Łuczyńska et al, 2018 ). However, understanding pollution in fish from remote lakes is frequently challenged by a lack of basic ecological data.…”

My experience with One Health: between realism and optimism

“…As minister of health of Colombia, I had to cope with the epidemics of Chikungunya and Zika (there were reports of ZVD clinical symptoms in more than 100,000 of people nationwide, the second highest number in clinical cases in Latin America) [1] . I felt powerless many times.…”